One of the most conspicuous qualities about David Lynch and the movies he made was his inversion of normalcy and weirdness. Everyday people were weird. You and I, the ones freaking out and making bad decisions, were perfectly normal. I can think of no greater tribute to the late storyteller than for us all to agree we’ll never use the modifier, Lynchian, again. David Lynch, as any great artist must be, was the only human being in the history of humankind who earned that honorific. So, instead, I’d rather focus on something tandem to that: spirituality.

Growing up there were two storytellers: the Coen Brothers with their rich agnosticism, and David Lynch with his multidisciplinary chaos. As a child of a Protestant family who left his faith behind at college, I related to David Lynch’s movies probably before I realized why. He shared an amnesty with Bob Clark, who retreated, as the mushroom cloud of Reagan’s America built, into the fifties—in the brief repose of fate our country enjoyed at the end of the Second World War. It wasn’t paradise, but it was paradisical.

There’s a great line in Steve Martin’s L.A. STORY, “a kiss may not be the truth, but it is what we wish were true.” I love that. Be careful what you wish for, though. In two of Lynch’s movies, BLUE VELVET and MULHOLLAND DRIVE we see with our own eyes two of our marquee idols, Isabella Rossellini and Naomi Watts respectively, stripped bare. And in both instances, far from being the cinematic wish fulfillment of our fantasies, it’s sad and it’s complicated in a very human way. It’s like what David Lynch, Isabella Rossellini, and Naomi Watts did was a kind of psychological magic trick into reminding us of our own humanity. The hard way.

When you think of it, all of Lynch’s heroes were women. Think of Laura Dern, in WILD AT HEART, or INLAND EMPIRE Patricia Arquette in LOST HIGHWAY. Sheryl Lee in TWIN PEAKS. Don’t get me wrong, David Lynch’s leading men all filled out terrific characters—Kyle MacLachlan foremost, as Dale Cooper, of course, but in the parameters of his stories David Lynch told us about the lives behind our fantasies. There was abuse that began at home, and bizarre expectations that began at home. So the inner life and its expression of sadness and sexuality began at home.

When you lose your faith you need something to replace it. It’s like addiction. You can’t just leave that negative space or you’ll just go back to what’s familiar. I think David Lynch understood that. I think his secular belief in things he didn’t understand was a dark beacon, and that all of the ugliness in his movies is in the light of grace because of him. He got the fantasy of an Eisenhower era America. He understood that THE WIZARD OF OZ got the escapism and the realism of our adventure together. He put forth a bold fantasy and then asked, of himself and the audience, why does this work for you?!

I’ve seen BLUE VELVET at least fifteen times. I enjoy watching it, and why!? It’s so hard to look inside, and he really got that.

In the back of one of my journals I have the number 534 written down. I was born on October 1st 1975. The writer, Vladimir Nabokov, died on July 2nd, 1977. That’s a span of 534 days—1976 was a leap year. It was my gibberish years (it’s still my gibberish years) but anytime I read his books (SPEAK, MEMORY, his memoir, is my favorite, and I don’t think a year goes by when I don’t reread it—if only in part) I feel like I’m a part of that saeculum (thank you, Rebecca Solnit). That the air he breathed was the air I breathed. I got nearly half a century in with David Lynch telling the American story, and even as we say goodbye I feel like he’s still the one telling that story.